​UN documents war crimes on both rebel and govt side as Syria crisis persists

A picture taken on January 12, 2014, shows a destroyed neighborhood in the city of Daraya, southwest of the capital Damascus (AFP Photo / LCDC) / AFP

More tortures and murders, committed by both the rebels and government forces, were revealed by UN war crimes specialists in Syria. The UN believes these crimes could successfully be taken up by the International Criminal Court.

A fourth and confidential list of war crimes suspects has been
compiled since July, said Karen Koning AbuZayd, an American
expert serving on the UN independent commission of inquiry.

In particular, foreign insurgents in Syria have their "own
agenda", she stated, which includes founding sharia courts
that hand down sentences and carry them out on the spot.

"Civil wars can be pretty bad, but people coming in from
outside with radical agendas really don't give a damn what they
do to things or people in that wonderful country that Syria
was," AbuZayd told Reuters.

In September, the UN specialists said that the militants stepped
up killings, executions and abuses in the north.

"Since there is tension between and among the various
opposition groups, we're getting more information about
opposition groups from other opposition groups. So there is more
information on both sides now," AbuZayd pointed out.

Russia has warned about the insurgents’ actions many times.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told RT, in an exclusive
interview, that the militant groups only worsen the plight of the
war-torn country.

“In reality the humanitarian crisis is getting worse mostly
because of the militants, because of those groups which many
countries have officially recognized as extremist and terrorist.
So we do need to address humanitarian issues, but instead of
fighting symptoms we should root out the cause of the
crisis,” Lavrov said. “And the root cause of the crisis
is that the terrorist threat is extremely serious in Syria
today.”

“Another concern is that we see among the rebels an
increasing number of jihadists who pursue extremist objectives.
They want to set up a caliphate and impose sharia laws, and
basically they are already terrorizing minorities,” he
added.

In December, UN human rights chief Navi Pillay said that evidence
collected by the investigators implicates President Bashar Assad.
But she later denied that she had direct knowledge of the report.

AbuZayd only said the lists went up to "higher levels" of the
Syrian government, but did not elaborate.

On the other hand, the UN experts could not so far confirm
earlier reports by CNN and the Guardian, implicating Assad’s
government in the torture and deaths of about 11,000 detainees.
The news outlets said they possessed some 55,000 pictures,
allegedly taken by a Syrian military police photographer, showing
the mutilated bodies of the purported victims.

"For us of course it is also a single source, which we
wouldn't use because it is only a single source," AbuZayd
stressed.

All in all, the researchers’ team of more than 20 investigators
interviewed 500 refugees, defectors and people still in Syria
since July, bringing the total number of testimonies gathered to
2,600 since September 2011, Reuters reported.

Over 130,000 people are believed to have died since the country’s
civil war broke out in 2011. Nearly a third of Syria’s 22 million
residents have been forced to flee their homes, and half are in
need of international aid, according to Reuters.